Did it hurt when you fell from Heaven?

OK, so Beijing is a pretty good place to be stuck if you don’t have much responsibility. My roommate, Joh, and I have walked around a good bit of the city. We went to Olympic Park the other day, which was pretty impressive, although I wouldn’t have made any of the buildings gray if it had been up to me; the Bird’s Nest just kinda blends into the haze over here. We also checked out the city center, including Tiananmen Square and Tiananmen Gate (more on that on June 4th, which is the 20th anniversary of the end of the pro-democracy protests), and the shopping district. The area around our apartment isn’t much for sightseeing, but it is great for experiencing actual Chinese culture instead of just the marketable stuff in the tourist areas.

Monday was to be the start of our work here, but, alas, swine flu has bought us another day of vacation. Someone on Joh’s flight has been confirmed as a carrier of the infamous H1N1 virus so we aren’t supposed to go into work just yet. Interestingly, we’re still allowed to ride the crowded subways to all of the crowded sites in this crowded city. No word just yet on when we will start working...

The jet lag has started to wear off, so last night we decided to go out and sample the night life in town. There is actually another group of journalism students from Penn State out here who we planned to meet up with in the Sanlitun district (big for tourists) for a beer or two. A lack of communication and punctuality led to us not being at the planned meeting point at the appointed time, where we were supposed to look for a tall guy named Matt (probably should have pressed for more description when we planned this), but we didn't give up there. Joh and I wandered through the bars yelling, "Matt!" at every tall guy we saw. When that didn't work, we grabbed an outdoor table on the main drag and ordered a couple of Tsingtaos. Whenever a tall Westerner walked by, I would nonchalantly make use of the name Matt or Penn State – “I don’t think he looks like a Matt.” or "I wonder if we'll ever find Matt." or "I'm glad I didn't go to Penn State" or "Do you think Matt likes lagers?" When this didn't work, I just started yelling at people as they approached, which did net a Briton named Matt, who, while very personable, was not the Matt we were looking for.

We did meet one of New York's finest, a firefighter named Jeff on vacation over here, who sat at the table next to ours. He had his Chinese-English dictionary with him, which he let the waiters borrow while we talked. In typical male fashion, they used it to look up all the dirty words, then asked us how to pronounce them. Another waiter spent the next couple of hours impressing us with his nasty, but often clever, pick-up lines and rap lyrics. Jay-Z would have been proud.

The lesson learned on the night was that you should always ask how much a beer costs before you order one. A lot of China is very loose when it comes to prices as long as you negotiate before hand. We found out we were paying about twice as much for a beer as the folks at the bar next door, but it was too late, and despite Joh's protests in Mandarin, we paid the price. Lesson learned.

Here’s another helpful hint should you ever visit China: gain access to a black Audi A4 with tinted windows. Something about that car over here – they have unlimited access. Security guards wave them through everywhere, no parking signs don’t apply, speed limits are mere suggestions. Just make sure to avoid using your turn signal – that will immediately let other drivers know you’re an imposter. No one uses turn signals here, they just honk.

Anyway, today will likely be a chill day since we got home very late last night and it's about 700 degrees outside. Maybe I’ll just sit outside and work on my beard tan...

Getting around the Great Firewall of China...

Hey kids –
So, you may have heard about the government in China controlling the Internet so it can both monitor what its citizens are viewing and prevent them from looking at information the state doesn’t like. Well, I am, at this point, unable to access the site through which I post entries to my blog. So, I’ve been forced to put my entries up through an intermediary. I’ll still be putting up everything I want to say, but you won’t get to see my pictures until I either figure out how to post from here or I get back to the states.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m in China now...

So, a lot of people have asked why I would want to come to China of all places to work with a news site. I guess now is as good a time as any to address that. Mind you, I have to be careful what I say here because the address for this blog happens to be my name, but suffice to say that problems are never solved by ignoring them. I don’t think my presence here will end China’s control over the flow of information on the Internet, but it gives me an appreciation for the benefits of the first amendment in the U.S. and, with any luck, it’ll give the people I work with an appreciation of those freedoms also. Those, my friends, are the seeds of change.

With that, I give you the stuff I’ve written since my arrival:


May 26 -
So I left the US on Sunday morning (May 25th)... got to Beijing Monday afternoon. I didn’t even have to change my watch since the time here is 12 hours ahead of Eastern time. What a relief...

The flight, however, was not a relief. I flew from Raleigh to Newark, then Newark to Beijing. More than 13 hours in seat 28A, which only reclined about three degrees because of the wall behind my seat. That wall, incidentally, happened to connect to the bathroom, so I got to feel the violent shudder of the toilet flushing/crashing for the entire flight. It was nice having a window seat though, even though it meant I had to disturb the two nice ladies sitting next to me every time I had to hit the latrine. We flew straight north from Newark so I got to see the Hudson Bay and all the glaciers in the Arctic. Kinda pretty. Then we flew south over Mongolia as we approached Beijing. I’m telling you, from when the glaciers ended up until we were about 100 miles out of Beijing, it was like we were over another planet. The view from my window was nothing but unspoiled earth – no roads, no farms, no homes. There were just rivers, mountains and dirt. It wasn’t what the average person would call a beautiful landscape, but there was a very nice quality to it in that there was no sign of ... well, anything.

I would like to compliment Continental Airlines for their entertainment on that flight. Every seat had an on-demand entertainment system built into the seat in front of it. I had command of more than 400 movies, a bunch of TV shows, games, music – you name it. I got to watch “All the President’s Men”, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Big,” “Back to the Future,” “Million Dollar Baby...” Great selection.

When we finally landed in Beijing at 1:50, it was great to stand up and look forward to actually walking again, even though it cut off the conclusion of “Million Dollar Baby.” Looking around at the passengers, I realized I hadn’t seen so many surgical masks since I stopped watching ER reruns. After everyone had begun to form lines to deplane, the Chinese authorities instructed us all to sit back down for a temperature screening. Total letdown – and kinda freaky - but there is no way it could have gone more quickly. Two nice-looking ladies walked through the entire plane with little temperature-reading ray guns in about five minutes.

Once we got off the plane, I really needed to use the restroom. The instant I walked in, I saw a surgical-mask-clad man standing by the sinks watching everyone. I’m not positive, but I think his job was to make sure all the travelers washed their hands.

The next step was to hand in the health form, which listed the towns I had visited in the last couple of weeks, any symptoms I was experiencing, and my contact information in China. I turned this in to a group of people dressed in white, also wearing surgical masks. I had a lot of trouble understanding what they were saying because their accents were so thick and I couldn’t watch their lips. After turning in the form, all the travelers had to walk by infrared cameras, which read body temperatures to catch people who might be sick. After I went through, I turned around to take a picture of the operation, which earned me the pursuit of one of the technicians who, after seeing the picture, made an X with his arms and watched me delete it. What a way to start the trip...

One of the ladies I’ll be working with met me at the airport and took me back to the apartment I’ll be sharing with another girl from UNC. It’s pretty nice. Two bedrooms with European-style closets and air conditioning, kitchen, living room and a bathroom with a dual-flush toilet (making the US the last country to figure out how awesome those are). It’s on the west side of Beijing, between the second and third of the highway loops around the city (I know there’s a word for those but it escapes me now...). Let’s just say I stand out in this part of town. My roommate is American, but she’s of Asian descent. I am a white dude with a beard, and that draws attention here. You know that feeling you get when people look at you and you feel like there’s something hanging out of your nose? Well, that’s what it felt like when I walked down the street this afternoon. It’s odd at first, but the people are doing it out of curiosity rather than suspicion, so it doesn’t bother me much.

I went for a walk in the afternoon to get a look at the neighborhood. I was actually a little shocked by the lack of uniqueness. It looks like any other group of buildings on the outskirts of a city, except there are obnoxious Chinese characters on everything instead of obnoxious English words, although in some cases, things here have both. The smog doesn’t seem as bad as I was led to believe it would be, maybe because there are so many trees in this area. They line the highways and are all over the side streets. Vendors are on every corner selling watermelon, bananas, apples and oranges – some out of the backs of vans, others on the backs of rickshaws.

I’d write more, but I’m tired to the point of deliria. I also don’t have Internet at the apartment, so I don’t have to get everything down today. Moral of the story is that I’m here, I’m safe, and I’m bound to become a local celebrity. More to come soon.



May 27 -
Today I saw my first Chinese morning. I should say I heard my first Chinese morning before I saw it. Our apartment is right over a pretty busy street and people here love to honk their horns. I know that’s characteristic of all cities, but it seems more rampant here. They even honk when there’s no one else on the road. I assume they do it as some sort of status check; they want to make sure the horn works in case they encounter an emergency later on.

I went for a run around the block, which was a bad idea. I was wrong about the pollution. I don’t really see it, but I can definitely feel it when I’m breathing hard. I don’t think I made it a mile before I started coughing. Part of that might be because I haven’t been drinking much water, but the smog definitely contributes. I wiped the sweat off my face as I headed home, and my shirt was covered in dirt – the smog will actually adhere to your sweat...So I don’t think there will be much running while I’m here.

It looks like I will be eating a lot of spicy food though. We ate some skewers from a roadside vendor today for lunch and I was en fuego. I don’t know what the meat was – it was red and very tender – but it was like sucking on a pepper. We also hit up one of the fruit vendors, and that was like buying food from heaven. I bought a bag full of cherries to try to calm my mouth down and they were so good I wanted to eat the seeds and stems too. At least I know I’ll be eating enough fruit on this trip.

Then I finally got on the Internet. We found an Internet café down the street a little ways. It only costs about $1.50 an hour, but I can’t use my memory stick and I can’t access my blog, so I’m not sure when I’ll get to post these entries up.

More to come...

Deal.

Way to go, Canes. I'll be proud to wear the beard over the summer.

And sorry, Joswiak, but the Canes are gonna run over the Penguins. Carolina in six...

Deal?

OK, Canes. For more than a month now, I have gone without shaving (I did shave my neck three times for special occasions, like golf yesterday). You pulled it out against New Jersey and then jumped ahead of Boston 3-1, only to get trounced (yes, trounced. or embarrassed, humiliated, spanked, ripped, etc.) in games five and six. Tonight, if you pull off the win in Boston, I will spend my entire summer with a playoff beard. I have to keep it presentable in China, so I'll be trimming it, but I will honor your trip to the conference semis by wearing my playoff beard to the Orient. Not to mention, if you win tonight, you'll avoid looking like chumps after dropping three straight.

Waddaya say?

Welcome to the neighborhood...

..
Wanna talk about a cute neighbor? Check this kid out...






He's five days old today. He was born in my backyard on Monday morning at about 6:00. No name yet, but I call him Skiddish. He's pretty shy and he's not very good at galloping, so he skids when he stops (hence the misspelling). He's deathly afraid of Mulva (that's my car's name. If you don't get it, watch more Seinfeld reruns.), so whenever I come up the driveway, he sprints like hell. The other day he couldn't stop in time, so he hit the wall of the barn. I felt bad for laughing, but it was just too cute.

He's getting used to me now, so he'll come up to say hi when I walk over, but his mom, Lady in Red, hates my guts. She was abused and the people who gave her to my landlord actually wanted to put her down for fear that she would never trust people. Well, she still doesn't trust me, but she spits out some damn cute babies.

So now that school is out for the summer, my life consists of packing for China and playing with Skiddish. Of course, playing with him only involves watching him jump around; we aren't supposed to touch him because baby horses don't develop an immune system until they hit six weeks.

All the people I started grad school with graduate tomorrow, which makes me sad. Had it not been for my unfortunate summer vacation last year, I'd be finishing up with them. We have a beach trip planned for the week before I head to Beijing, so that will make for a proper goodbye.

So, that's life as I know it. I'll be blogging more often once I hit the PRC - unless the Man comes after me - so keep an eye out.